Adolescents' self-attributed moral emotions following a moral transgression: Relations with delinquency, confidence in moral judgment and age

The study investigates adolescents' self-attributed moral emotions following a moral transgression by expanding research with children on the happy-victimizer phenomenon. In a sample of 200 German adolescents from Grades 7, 9, 11, and 13 (M = 16.18 years, SD = 2.41), participants were confronted with various scenarios describing different moral rule violations and asked to judge the behaviour from a moral point of view. Subsequently, participants' strength of self-evaluative emotional reactions was assessed as they were asked to imagine that they had committed the moral transgression by themselves. Results indicate that the intensity of self-attributed moral emotions predicted adolescents' self-reported delinquent behaviour even when social desirability response bias was controlled. Further, as adolescents' metacognitive understanding of moral beliefs developed, self-attributed moral emotions and confidence in moral judgment became more closely associated. No general age-related change in adolescents' self-attributed moral emotions was found. Overall, the study provides evidence for a coordination process of moral judgment and moral emotion attributions that continues well beyond childhood and that corresponds with the more general notion of the formation of a moral self in adolescence.